The fanciest game console you can buy

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 52, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I swear I don't always just share absurdly expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I've been reading about Chappell Roan and college football and the problem with pennies, watching Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist and Jennifer Garner's delightful AD home tour, taking copious notes on Ben Thompson's newslettering process, making surprisingly great bread with a random recipe from Reddit, and trying out Google's Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

I also have for you some expensive but excellent new gadgets, a couple of great new tech podcasts, the best pause music ever, a new game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let's dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be watching, reading, playing, building, buying, or singing in the car? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The PS5 Pro. I can't imagine spending $700 on any game console, let alone one with no disc drive. That said, I do love the idea of flying around in Spider-Man 2 - the only game I love to just aimlessly explore for hours at a time - with perfect graphics at blistering frame rates. Technically this isn't up for preorder for a couple of weeks, but I'm sharing it now because we're all going to need to start saving money ASAP.The AirPods 4 with ANC. I'm sure the iPhone 16 is fine, but to my mind, this is the most exciting thing Apple launched this week - a set of open-ear headphones with decent noise cancellation is a rare and exciting thing. (The AirPods Pro hearing aid stuff is also extremely cool.)The Huawei Mate XT. This is the phone of the week. I can't stop watching the video of the trifold, which gives intense Westworld tablet vibes, in the best possible way. You probably can't buy it, and at $2,800, you probably wouldn't want to anyway, but I love that this thing exists.Will & Harper. I keep hearing great things about this doc, in which Will Ferrell and Harper Steele drive across the country and try to make sense of their relationship after Steele came out as trans. There's a great New York Times interview with them about the process, too.Channels with Peter Kafka. Nobody does insidery tech media pods like Kafka, so I was psyched to see him back on the digital airwaves once again. (I guess, disclosure, he's making the show with Vox Media, The Verge's parent company.) The first episode, with New Yorker editor David Remnick, was a good one.Panic World. Another great new podcast! Ryan Broderick writes one of my absolute favorite newsletters about the internet, Garbage Day, and the first episode of the podcast has the same "smart but borderline unhinged" vibe to it. It's delightful.Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. I'm a pretty simple gamer. I like games where I get to battle with and / or against cool robots, and I love when everything is needlessly intense and gory. All of which is to say, I'm confident I will find the latest Warhammer installment utterly ridiculous and delightful - just as everyone else seems to."Goldeneye Watch Music." This song is 100 percent guaranteed to be on my Spotify Wrapped this year, just based on this week alone. The epic pause music from an all-time great game is now six minutes long, super high-def, and constantly on repeat while I work.iFixit's FixHub Smart Soldering Iron. I trust The Verge's Sean Hollister completely when it comes to techie DIY, and he loves iFixit's super-portable, super-simple tool for all things liquid metal. It's not cheap, but it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.Chrome Tab Groups on iOS. A tiny but really welcome browser upgrade: you can now sync tab groups from your computer to your iPhone. (It already worked on Android.) Tab management on mobile is generally trash, and tab groups are a really good, not-quite-bookmarks way to keep things in order.